When to hire an email marketing agency, and when not to yet

Revenue isn't the signal most people think it is

Let's face it: the usual trigger for the call is a turnover figure somebody read in a webinar. It's the wrong one. Plenty of brands turning over well have nothing an agency can improve yet, and plenty of smaller ones are leaking money every week.

The real trigger is a queue nobody is clearing. Campaigns that should have gone out last week. A welcome series still on the list from March. A report nobody has opened since the platform was set up. That's a capacity problem, and capacity is the thing an agency genuinely sells.

Three situations where we would tell you to wait

We say no to work for reasons we publish, and they're on the buyer's guide. Timing is the commonest one, and it's usually one of these three.

• Almost nobody's visiting the shop. Email multiplies traffic you already have. It doesn't create it, and no flow can catch a customer who was never on the site.
• Nobody can buy twice yet. One product with a long replacement cycle and no range around it gives retention nothing to work with until the range exists.
• The list is a few hundred people who came from one competition. That's a list to rebuild, not to send to, and rebuilding it is a sign-up form job, not a retainer.

None of those are permanent. They're sequencing. The brands that come back six months later with traffic and a second product are the ones where the first three months of work actually lands, because there's something for it to land on.

The two that mean it's already late

The other half is easier. If either of these is true, waiting another quarter costs you more than the work does, and it's probably been true for a while.

First: traffic arrives, people buy, and there's nothing behind them, or the flows went live once and nobody has opened them since. Second: peak trading is close and the calendar isn't written, which is a deadline, not an opinion. See the the flow library for what should be running before either of those matters.

Both are the cost of delay, not a missed opportunity. The flows that aren't running weren't earning last month either, and that's money nobody can go back and collect.

What has to be true for a retainer to pay for itself

There's no price on this page and no worked example, because both would be dishonest without knowing your margins. The mechanism is simple enough to check yourself: automated flows have to earn more than they cost to build and run, month after month, while nobody sends anything.

So the honest test is whether your traffic and your repeat rate can carry a base like that. If they can, the build pays back and keeps paying. If they can't yet, a retainer buys you a set of flows nobody enters, and you'll conclude that email doesn't work for your brand. It'll be the wrong conclusion.

The work worth doing before you hire anybody

Everything below is free, takes an afternoon and makes the first agency call far more useful. It also answers the question on its own now and then, and we're fine with that.

Do them in this order. The flows are worth more than the campaigns, and the sign-up form is worth more than either, because it decides how many people ever reach them.

1. Score the account against the Flow Audit Scorecard on the free playbooks page, which takes about five minutes
2. Build the two flows it marks lowest, using the templates that already exist in your platform
3. Fix the sign-up form so it's worth opening, instead of adding another one
4. Send one campaign a week for a month, to people who have opened something recently
5. Then look at what changed, and decide whether the bottleneck is skill or time

What hiring well looks like from the inside

The first ninety days are catch-up, not growth. Deliverability gets checked, the list gets cleaned, the missing flows get built and the calendar starts running. Most of that is invisible from the outside and none of it is glamorous.

Growth turns up after the catch-up, so a quarter is the shortest sensible period to judge anything on. It's also why a twelve month term is unnecessary: if a quarter proves the work, a year is somebody protecting their forecast.

If you're somewhere in the middle of all this and not sure which half you're in, that's what the discovery call is for. We'll tell you to wait if waiting is right, because a brand that hires us too early leaves in month five and tells people email didn't work.